No, Melissa Harris Perry, Darth Vader Isn't a Racist Character

I just felt a disturbance in The Force, like millions of hot takes crying out at once...

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I just felt a disturbance in The Force, like millions of hot takes crying out at once...

If you're anything like me, then you are on the edge of your seat waiting for the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (despite the title's resemblance to an intergalactic Folgers commercial). As we all know, nothing enhances enjoyment of Star Wars quite the way a cable news panel segment can; if George Lucas ruined Star Wars by underthinking the prequels, you can bet cable news pundits can ruin it by overthinking.

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Enter MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry, who was flagged by conservatives Sunday for accusing Star Wars of racism because of Darth Vader:

MHP: I know why I have feelings -- good, bad, and otherwise -- about Star Wars. And I have a lot. I could spend the whole day talking about the whole Darth Vader situation.

Wesley Morris: Really? You could?

MHP: Yeah, like, the part where he was totally a black guy whose name basically was James Earl Jones, who, and we were all, but while he was black, he was terrible and bad and awful and used to cut off white men's hands, and didn't, you know, actually claim his son. But as soon as he claims his son and goes over to the good, he takes off his mask and he is white. Yes, I have many, many feelings about that, but I will try to put them over here.

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Now, conservative will disagree with MHP because she's saying that something is racist, which nothing ever is, and for Perry's insufficient gratitude on behalf of James Earl Jones (they've got it backwards, of course; Jones helped Star Wars way more than it helped him), but they are wrong. There were lots of racist things about Star Wars, and not just with the prequels. For example, all of the (mostly-white) human characters are normative, while all of the clearly identifiable alien races are rigidly stereotyped. The stereotypes just became much more recognizable in the awful prequels.

No, the problem with MHP's analysis is that it is already a reach, and a factually flawed reach. Although he was known to choke a fool, Vader only cut off one white man's hand, and it belonged to his son, (SPOILER ALERT) Luke Skywalker. This is important because he performed the deed right before he claimed his son in the most famous son-claiming ever. Darth Vader never didn't claim his son, he just thought he was dead.

It would be an entire movie later before Vader would be revealed beneath that helmet, which was, indeed, a mistake by George Lucas. Nothing could have lived up to the mystery that had built up behind that mask, but especially not the revelation that Darth Vader is essentially Conchata Ferrell after a badly-botched spa day. Besides, after 20 years in that mask, how can anyone be sure Anakin Skywalker was white, and not just really, really ashy?

It was in the next segment that things got really weird. After my old pal Glynnis MacNicol offered her defense of Princess Leia's slave-girl costume (to which I would only add that the costume was always intended to signify the piggishness of Jabba the Hutt more than anything else, and that Carrie Fisher acted it as the unfamiliar drag that it was for her character), Princeton University Professor of Politics Amaney Jamal brought up the importance of having people you can identify with in movies.

"Studies have shown that people will identify with people that look like them in these movies," Prof. Jamal said, adding "It's important for people to have characters they can identify with."

That prompted an unusual memory from MHP, the weirdness of which did not appear to be lost on New York Times critic Wesley Morris:

MHP: When I was a kid, I had barbies that were African-American, and I hated Ken because he seemed wack. So I used to always marry them off to Chewbacca. And so given that you are saying...

Wesley Morris: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute...

MHP: I married all my black Barbie dolls off to Chewbacca, that was to be, he was tall...

Wesley Morris: Hairy.

MHP: Hairy, kind of in control of the situation. (Horrible impression of Chewbacca's growl)

Wesley Morris: Sub-lingual, that's...

MHP: Yeah. And now that you are saying this is, yeah, I'm wondering about -- I have concerns about my own childhood now.

Wait, what? Now, I can understand feeling alienated by Ken, and given MHP's Mormon upbringing, I guess I can understand her marrying all of her black Barbies to one dude, but it also sounds to me like she's saying that the Wookiee was the stand-in for black men. She couldn't find a black GI Joe? Hell, what about Lando?

In that context, as Morris seemed to allude, Chewbacca embodies many of the brutish, bestial stereotypes that still resonate in our culture, so maybe MHP is right to have concerns. She has repeatedly glossed over and made excuses for the Mormon church's racism, but maybe some of that sank in. Or maybe, as 900 year-old OG Yoda might say, "Overthink Star Wars a little less, should we all."

I like Harris-Perry, but I have a thing about injecting those who I consider to be "noncombatants" into the public debate. It's unfair, easy and oftentimes cruel. Unfortunately, there are many players on the right who have also failed to follow this rule. In fact, there are quite a few examples of right-wing talkers and bloggers who completely steamrolled over this rule, stopped, backed over it, then jammed the gears to run over it again.

Reporters from Fox News and ABC News double-teamed Press Secretary Jay Carney using a right-wing study of an apparent White House gender pay gap, and CNN stuck the dismount by carving out the section of Carney's answer that seemed to validate that talking point. On Saturday morning's Melissa Harris-Perry show, host Melissa Harris-Perry demonstrated how the same tactic can be used from the left by accusing Jay Carney of "mansplaining" the gap, and similarly clipping his response to suit her narrative.

Given Coulter's entire career has been built off the fact that she is completely crazy, her scathing attack on Harris-Perry ranks up there with the best examples of right wing hypocrisy in recent memory.

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen is the personification of the pompous windbag cliché. He always has been. And has he's gotten old, it's only gotten worse.There was once a time when puffed-up jackasses like him strode across the media landscape like kings of the jungle, and to be honest it's difficult to describe to anyone below a certain age just how tedious this era was in journalism. But changing times and cultural shifts have taken a toll on the Richard Cohens of the world and now all you really hear from them is the forlorn cries off in the distance as they face down inevitable extinction. Sure, guys like Cohen, and Friedman, and Brooks still have jobs, but they're not the exalted voices from on-high they once were. The smart ones don't complain about it; they simply keep on keeping on, perfectly content in their gargantuan sense of self-importance and their continued big paychecks. But Cohen can't do that. He needs the adulation of the masses. He needs things to be the way they were in the good old days, before independent women and a cultural distaste for people who believe that all black men should immediately be viewed as suspicious made things so confusing. That was the time when people actually cared what kind of wisdom an Interesting Man like Richard Cohen had to impart to the world. It's almost enough to make you cry.Except that it shouldn't. Not ever. Because it's important to keep in mind that Richard Cohen is an asshole. A monumental asshole.Only a monumental asshole could write an entire column on how it's not racism but "reality" to profile young black men immediately following the acquittal of the guy who profiled and ultimately killed Trayvon Martin. Only a monumental asshole would actually try to argue that it makes perfect sense that Zimmerman automatically assumed Martin was a threat just by the color of his skin and the clothes he wore.Only a monumental asshole can write something like this: "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news...There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason."Richard Cohen is indeed a monumental asshole.The Washington Post: "Racism vs. Reality" by Richard Cohen/7.16.13In November of last year, I wrote a piece for Banter pegged off of something else shockingly ridiculous that Richard Cohen had written."The White Guy of a Certain Age's Lament" (Originally Published at the Daily Banter, 11.28.12)I'm sure you probably already know this, but it's a really tough time to be a white guy of a certain age right now. Everything's just so upside-down and nothing's how it used to be, with white guys of a certain age lumbering across the face of the earth like mighty dinosaurs, perfectly, languorously content in their dominion over all creatures. There was the re-election of the weirdly named multi-cultural black man Barack Obama -- along with the denial of the whitest, most of-a-certain-age man alive, Mitt Romney -- and its heralding of the demographic shift that's wresting power from their hands and giving to welfare queens and leaf-blowers. At the same time, there was the backlash against the attempt by a popular and official collective of über-white men -- the GOP -- to restrict the reproductive freedom of women on the grounds that not having proper babies from white guys of a certain age constitutes indefensible promiscuity anyway. But that's politics. The real battlefield for white guys of a certain age these days seems to be pop culture, which is telling them that they can't just "show up" and still be the subject of adoration, as they once were, while simultaneously reminding them at every turn that the various peoples of the globe have other interests besides their lengthy, fascinating tales of their own heroic exploits that involve the experience of just being white guys of a certain age. Over the past 48-hours, we've been treated to two comically embarrassing screeds lamenting the changing face of American and world culture into one that devalues the traditional merits and interests of the white guy of a certain age. One is self-pitying and personally revelatory in ways I'm not sure the author fully intended; the other is bitter, pissy and amusingly detached from the times in a way that only a man who shouts at kids to get off his lawn can find civil. The latter, of course, involves Bill O'Reilly, the recently self-knighted harbinger of doom for white-guys-of-a-certain-age culture and the official miserable, racist uncle to all of America. Last night, on his regular prime-time complaint box on Fox News, O'Reilly and hack shrink Keith Ablow attempted to dissect the immense popularity of Psy's Gangnam Style, which recently surpassed Baby, from the harmless and infinitely less confusing Justin Bieber, as YouTube's most-watched video ever and is on track to having over a billion hits. O'Reilly, as you might imagine, can't fathom the popularity of Gangnam Style, which he describes as "a little fat guy from Pyongyang or someplace... doing the pony." His and Ablow's debate over the clip and desperate attempt to understand the viral phenomenon that's sprung from it -- which lasted more than five minutes -- truly has to be seen to be fully appreciated. Ablow decides to go all Kierkegaardian nihilism, saying that the song literally means and affirms nothing, which is why it's the perfect mirror for our current culture; he even argues that Psy is uttering gibberish instead of "intelligible words," which he believes confirms his theory. That the lyrics of the song are in Korean never even comes close to popping the provincial bubble Ablow, O'Reilly and Fox News's audience exist inside of; I guess they figure that if something is huge internationally it has to have come from America. Haven't those Asians heard how exceptional we are? Don't they watch The O'Reilly Factor? For his part, O'Reilly simply dismisses the whole thing as madness.For the record, I couldn't care less about Psy or Gangnam Style -- like most internet fads, it's annoying as hell -- but I can appreciate that it was written by someone whose experience isn't mine and who was attempting to satirize a place I didn't even know existed and a lifestyle I've never seen for myself. K-Pop isn't my thing and neither is the often peculiar Asian appropriation of hip-hop, but I'd never argue that the song is about nothing just because I don't understand it. I'm also not an asshole to the nearly unsurpassable extent that O'Reilly and Ablow are. But if you thought those two could turn a pop culture phenomenon into a full-on existential crisis, you haven't read Richard Cohen's recent and instantly legendary elegy to his fading place as an object of feminine desire. I wouldn't be surprised if Cohen really believed he was simply examining the changing face of masculinity during his write-up of the new James Bond movie in Monday's Washington Post, but let's be honest: He was lamenting the fact that he, 71-year-old Richard Cohen, can't score 20-something pussy anymore. In the column, Cohen mourns the death of what he calls the "sexual meritocracy" of years past, when guys like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart could nail women much younger than themselves by virtue of little more than their "experience and savoir-faire" and their ability to, preposterously, "send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning." He compares these qualities, ones you can easily imagine him ascribing to himself, to those Daniel Craig displays in Skyfall. The result is a piece of intellectual resentment almost impossible to truly describe without hearing the voice of Family Guy's "Buzz Killington" in your head. "Nothing about him looks natural, relaxed -- a man in the prime of his life and enjoying it. Instead, I see a man chasing youth on a treadmill, performing sets and reps, a clean and press, a weighted knee raise, an incline pushup and, finally, something called an incline pec fly (don't ask) ... Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen or a conversation not held."While I'm sure you can sympathize with the ways in which Daniel Craig is crushing Richard Cohen's self-esteem and taking all the women who would otherwise be gushing over his droll tales of hours spent painstakingly crafting didactic, faux-erudite columns for The Washington Post, it's ludicrous to make the assumption that because someone is physically fit, that person must be neglecting other parts of him or herself -- as if bettering your mind and body is a zero-sum game. It's basically Cohen bemoaning his loss of entitlement and being petty, jealous and essentially the real-life equivalent of William H. Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie character in Magnolia, sitting at the end of the bar pondering aloud why nobody wants to be with him anymore. On the plus side, he couldn't have written a column that's stronger catnip for the girls over at Jezebel if he'd tried. Years ago, the late William F. Buckley wrote a series of novels about a character with the hilariously improbable name Blackford Oakes. Oakes is a rakish CIA agent and man of mystery who travels the globe foiling cold war-era plots and sleeping with beautiful women, despite having a pretty little liberal-arts lady back home in the land of the free who cares for him dearly but whom he must constantly condescend to lovingly and lecture about the true nature of the world. He's sexy, lethal, Ivy League-educated, and always a gentleman. In other words, he's exactly how a pompous bore like William F. Buckley imagined himself; he's Buckley's alter-egomaniac. Buckley's bombastically high opinion of himself didn't manifest in self-pitying public requiems, as Cohen's did -- it was turned into really crappy dime-store spy novels. Cohen should take up fiction. It would be less humiliating to him.It's worth mentioning that both O'Reilly and Cohen have been accused in the past of inappropriate sexual conduct with women much younger than them. O'Reilly's target, infamously, was producer Andrea Mackris, whom he offered to "falafel" in the shower because she supposedly had "nice boobs"; Cohen's was a 23-year-old editorial aide named Devon Spurgeon (he also had an affair with Peter Jennings's wife back in the late 80s). See, there was a time when white guys of a certain age like them, as lords of the sexual meritocracy, could expect to exert their privilege and not only get away with it but have women fall willingly and effortlessly into their powerful, interesting arms. All they had to do was show up. They were the kings of all they surveyed and everything went their way and made complete sense to them at all times. Those days, though, may be coming to an end.We now live in a changing world, one where a pudgy Korean guy can be an American and global phenomenon and James Bond isn't just the coolest man in the world, he's also one of the hottest. Yes, it's a tough time for white guys of a certain age. The good news is that they'll grow out of it. And besides, white guys still have it pretty great all the way around. Just ask anyone else.

Just as the public was suckered by Trump, they are being suckered by a sham fight that won't deliver on any of its promises. Both McGregor and Mayweather will be left richer than you or I can possibly imagine, and we'll be left wondering why we dropped $100 on the pay per view to watch a public sparring session for Floyd Mayweather.